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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Although many proposals can be found to be able to open download folders with a file manager of user's choice (e.g. via "xdg-open file:///path/to/the/dir/" ), nautilus still seems hard coded in the linux versions of Firefox (a.k.a. "Iceweasel" in Debian).

You may find dozens of clues, how someone at some time managed to achieve that ... ranging from gconf-editor over mimeTypes.rdf and/or defaults.list (each of them on system or per user level), mimeinfo.cache to about:config. But at present (Firefox 6.0.2) none of them works, apart from the most brutal workaround, which replaces /usr/bin/nautilus by a link to /usr/bin/konqueror.
But at least in a multi-user environments that is inflexible, too, and above all will only work until the next update.

Therefore, as long as Mozilla won't change anything, it seems preferable to prepend $PATH with some user defined folder. For example. in ~/.bashrc define:

Code:

PATH=~/bin:$PATH

In that folder, (~/bin in the example above) create a textfile, name it (exactly) "nautilus" and don't forget to make it executable, e.g. by

Code:

chmod u+x ~/bin/nautilus

From now on, for your account this script will be invoked instead of /usr/bin/nautilus. This way it is able to check each time, whether it runs "on behalf of firefox", and if so, start a file manager of your choice, else the real /usr/bin/nautilus. Apart from what one might expect, in the first case the process ID (PID) from the calling (parent) process (which is easily available as $PPID) is not firefox's PIS, but "1" - hence we don't even have to find out the browser's PID. Firefox's requests for nautilus are additionally distinct by including a "--no-desktop" option. However, in particular on a machine with a non-GNOME-desktpo where nautilus is unlikely to be run by the user, this should not need further testing ,-)

Then we just have to extract the "containing folder", which shows up by the user defined "%c" and replace any enquoted blanks and special characters, as most file managers won't deal with them. Fortunately again, bash can to that for us even without external tools (like sed).

Finally, nothing detains us from opening the download folder with a file manager of our own choice; as a user of KDE this is likely to be dolphin, konqueror or krusader. Konqueror can even be forced into a certain layout using the "--profile" option (called "downloads" in the example below).

* I would expect these to work in the browsers web context , but not in the "open containing folder" dialog, which is somewhat separate (other words: browsing the web, not the local filesystem). If it was not, I would expect the usual "open with <select...>"-Option, which is missing, too.

* There is no entry for "folder", "directory", "inode", "file" (or the respective localized phrases). However, if a file browser could be configured, and nautilus was just a default, I would expect an entry for nautilus. Which isn't there.

If you're talking about when you right-click a download and it says Open Folder, you just go to that menu and pick your file manager next to the File entry (choosing Use Other if necessary to find the executable for your file manager).

I might be misunderstanding what you're trying to do with this though, or maybe its fixing an issue that isn't present in Slackware (guessing that you use debian).

> ... and it says Open Folder, you just go to that menu and pick your file manager next to the File entry ...

You are right: There is *no* such "Other"option available or "Open with...", just "Öffnen" ("Open", which starts an application associated with a certain file type), "Beinhaltenden Ordner anzeigen" ("Open containing folder", which obviously is a hard coded call to nautilus on Linux versions of Firefox) and four further, but not relevant context menu items.

For further clarification, I'll attach screenshots from Debian, openSuSE and Ubuntu 11-4.

(The only way you use do is: open a containing folder in nautilus, go to its parent folder, "open" this by "with..." (using nautilus' own context menu) with e.g. konqueror, close nautilus and re-enter the subfolder you came from in konqueror. But that's a quite toilsome procedure, isn't it?)

Sigh, I'd be glad if it was such easy. After upgrading to Firefox (a.k.a. Iceweasel in Debian) to v. 30 I realized that the trick mentioned above (using a customized ~/bin/nautilus) doesn't work anymore. At first sight one could believe that's just because Firefox on Linux/KDE now does not start "nautilus" anymore, but another file browser called "caja".

But to my surprise, using a customized ~/bin/caja (with ~/bin prepended to $PATH) does not help anymore, too. (I tried to find out what is going on under the hood using "strace -f iceweasel", but have not found anything usable).

The only constant thing in this misery: the most obvious thing (going "edit > preferences > applications" and setting [Content Type]:file as desired) has had no effect years ago and still does not today :-(

The content is to be taken from /usr/share/applications/. I do not use gnome, so you have to look for nautilus's desktop file for yourself. My example would be valid if there was a subdirectory "gnome" with the file "nautilus.desktop" in it.

For some reason firefox and thunderbird ignore the current user's setting regarding mime type handler priority, so the priority has to be configured system wide. Works also for PDF (never again gimp-autostart if I just want to read a pdf)

thanks for your suggestion! I've created /usr/share/applications/mimeapps.list with the proposed content - to no avail. After restart Firefox still starts an application that introduces itself as "caja" when I ask to "open containing folder".

Well, that's because yesterday I replaced /usr/bin/caja with a link to konqueror (just following the old wisdom, by which, if the mountain won't come to the prophet, the prophet must go to the mountain). But, even that did not work.

So the only reasonable concusion to me seems that this mysterious "caja" is built-in into iceweasel...!?

Maybe you just purged you whole desktop. Not good if it's the case. Did you logout and re-login? If not, all files where still open, including caja and it's dependencies. Open files are still accessible by their open handles.

No need to worry, I'm a passionate KDE user and therefore not affected by deinstallation of some MATE packages. For the same reason, there were surely no other running processes of caja, and to be sure about that I had issued "killall caja" before each test.

Here is some further information collected today:

Astonishingly enough, the mechanism by which Firefox (FF) starts a file browser is tolerant and somewhat robust against renaming, e.g. /usr/bin/caja to /usr/bin/caja.bak which I did before. In particular that (/usr/bin/caja.bak) was the only file that had "survived" the purging of its packages, and after that, showed up as "caja.bak" in the process list. Hence, it is not a built-in in FF.

After removal of /usr/bin/caja.bak, FF chose nautilus again. (However, the wrapper script mentiones above in this thread did not work anymore.)

Code:

strace -f iceweasel 2> /tmp/fftest

unveilled after "Open containing folder" of /tmp/ThisIsSomethingVerySpecial/tmp.html (which I saved before from FF):

According to that, FF seems to send a message to somewhere (maybe on one of six running instances of "dbus-daemon", three of them running as root) via somewhat (Session Bus?) asking for "org.freedesktop.FileManager1". Whatever process is fulfilling this request does not know about the user's environment (at least not user's $PATH), because "/usr/bin/nautilus" gets precedence over /home/$USER/bin/nautilus (/home/$USER/bin/ is first part of user's $PATH).

Just for testing purposes: if we replace /usr/bin/nautilus by a link to the script "/home/$USER/bin/nautilus", it works again like it did the past some years. However, messing up /usr/bin/ is not my intention...

So the residual question is: where to configure konqueror instead of nautilus for "org.freedesktop.FileManager1"?

Would you think it's a good idea to move /home/$USER/bin/nautilus (the switching script) to /usr/local/bin/ ?

Or, if things are done by a dbus-daemon instance running as $USER, make dbus-daemon's environment have $USER's path (which should restore the behavior that me and some other people lived very happy with)? At the moment, this seems most after my fancy.

Not much because I don't know anything about dbus interface organisation, but I expected "org.freedesktop.FileManager1" in there. The closest hit is "org.freedesktop.NemoFileManager1".

My theory is that there are dbus interfaces running in your session, which I don't have. And that iceweasel preferes some gnome-related interface for opening directories. My qdbus output is much shorter than yours. Try to find out what starts all these dbus interfaces, and if there is a possibility to prevent that.

Quote:

Would you think it's a good idea to move /home/$USER/bin/nautilus (the switching script) to /usr/local/bin/ ?

Or, if things are done by a dbus-daemon instance running as $USER, make dbus-daemon's environment have $USER's path (which should restore the behavior that me and some other people lived very happy with)? At the moment, this seems most after my fancy.

I use KDE 4 in Debian Jessie, and everytime I clicked "Open Containing Folder" on a downloaded file, Iceweasel weirdly lauched qmmp (the music player). Being a dummy linux user, what I did was go to KDE systemsettings (Start Menu > Settings > System Settings) and in "Default Applications" I changed from Dolphin to Konqueror. Then Iceweasel started using konqueror to open folders. Then I changed it back to Dolphin, and now it uses Dolphin.